Marketing innovation can move at a rapid pace, and advertisers must be agile and ready to change course, if necessary -- especially when it comes to data. Advertisers want to be sure they are making the best marketing decisions and ensuring they have the best data possible is key. So how can marketers keep up?

Greg Rosen, vice president of product for digital marketing intelligence platform Pathmatics, sat down to talk about the changing ad landscape, the need for constant innovation and the importance of real-time data with a human element:

How is the ad landscape changing, and how is that forcing industry players to innovate?

Rosen

Over the past several years, we’ve seen many shifts in advertising, starting with the major shift of ad dollars to digital, and then more recently to social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, among others. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in programmatic advertising and other tech platforms that help marketers better ensure their ad dollars are being spent against their target audiences. On top of this, the addition of Amazon’s new advertising options, the rise of YouTube and video ads and new innovations in artificial intelligence have created a landscape where access to the right tools and transparency are more imperative than ever before.

How is Pathmatics meeting the challenge to innovate?

Pathmatics is a digital solution born in the digital age. We've never been tied to clunky, legacy platforms, and we have built our platform to be nimble and shift with the changing times. For example, when HTML 5 creatives became popular, we were the first to capture and report these ads. Similarly, as social advertising became a major part of brands' advertising strategies, Pathmatics worked to eliminate the increasing digital visibility gap by becoming the first to capture and report on Facebook data via our Facebook mobile panel.

This year we were the first in the space to release a desktop panel, which builds upon our original crawler methodology to provide our users with visibility into the diverse YouTube ecosystem, the walled gardens (such as Hulu, Wall Street Journal, etc.) and targeted campaigns (i.e. audience targeting, retargeting and local targeting).

Why is having a more comprehensive, real-time human view of data important? What are the benefits of this kind of data?

As mentioned above, with the inclusion of panel data, we now have access to highly targeted advertising data that crawlers have limited access to. Because our panelists are real people exhibiting real browsing behaviors on the web, we can now capture the most representative sample of the digital ad population possible. Together, the two methods of crawler and panel provide our users with a more robust picture of what's happening in digital advertising today.

How is video evolving? What trends are you seeing in the usage of YouTube and other video platforms?

The continued growth and investment in video advertising is well-documented in the industry. Our clients are among the many increasing their investments in video advertising and turning to us to stay on top of the trends in the video space.

With the recent inclusion of our desktop panel data, we are seeing the immense scale of the penetration of YouTube, with users spending a great deal of engaged time within the YouTube platform, spanning an endless amount of different channels and videos.

For Pathmatics and our clients, the inclusion of panel data has greatly deepened our ability to report on the video advertising activity across more YouTube videos, channels, advertisers and creatives.

Greg Rosen has spent his career building data tools for marketers. After starting his career at JPMorgan Chase, he led the product teams for CitizenNet, the social media buying and analysis platform acquired by Conde Nast in 2017. Greg holds a BA in economics and Hispanic studies from the University of Pennsylvania.